The Lion King (2019)

 

The Low-Down: For the past decade, Disney has dedicated an immense amount of resources to translating its classic animated films into live-action blockbusters – with varying degrees of success. This new incarnation of The Lion King is unusual because it is, in itself, another kind of animated film: all its creatures, great and small, are computer-generated to look photo-real. The technical wizardry on display is undoubtedly impressive. But the final film winds up undermining its own existence – what is the point of re-making something that evidently works so much better with traditional hand-drawn animation?

The Story: If you’ve seen the original 1994 film, there’ll be no surprises here. We are introduced to the adorable Simba (voiced by JD McCrary as a cub, before ageing into Donald Glover), the little prince who will one day lead his pride as a king. But even the best-laid succession plans crumble into dust when Simba’s sinister uncle, Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor), plots against reigning king Mufasa (James Earl Jones). After tragedy strikes, Simba is forced to build a new life for himself – even though his true destiny lies far closer to home.

The Good: There’s no denying that the cutting-edge technology used to bring Simba’s pridelands to life is really quite remarkable. It’s photo-real in a way that probably wasn’t possible even a few years ago, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve stumbled onto a sublimely shot nature documentary if you watch this film without the sound on. That’s not advisable, however, as director Jon Favreau clearly put some effort into engineering a new soundscape for the film. Elton John’s score is beautifully refreshed, mixed with a fresh energy and rhythm that work very well (even though the new songs – Beyonce’s Spirit and John’s end-credits number, Never Too Late – aren’t particularly memorable). The new voice cast is mostly very appealing. Glover never quite manages to slip under Simba’s skin, but Ejiofor deliciously unearths several shades of evil as Scar, and John Oliver is a hoot as fluttery hornbill advisor Zazu.

The Not-So-Good: The biggest problem with this film is that its best feature also happens to be its worst. This new kind of photo-real animation looks great, but it somehow manages to appear life-like while lacking any actual life. As it turns out, hyper-realistic lions can’t emote or talk like humans, so it borders on the ridiculous (and unnerving) to have them do just that. Moments that broke your heart in the original 1994 film might make you giggle 25 years later. It’s unfortunate, too, that Favreau’s film hews so closely to its predecessor’s script and story beats. With that crucial spark of life – or soul, as it were – already missing from these lions, you’ll only become more aware of the weaknesses that have always been a part of Simba’s rather patchy emotional trajectory. (Chiefly: does he actually learn anything? Guilt and grief alone do not a character’s growth make.)

Comic Relief: Favreau’s film almost slavishly follows its predecessor, except it allows comedians Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen a little room to riff as Timon (meerkat) and Pumbaa (warthog) respectively. Together, they provide some of the film’s funniest – as well as its most annoying – moments. In one instance, they make an inspired reference to another classic Disney movie that’s a surefire crowd-pleaser, even though its cheeky meta-textuality adds to the film’s tonal woes.

Recommended? Not particularly. This Lion King is more misfire than masterpiece.

 

Bad Neighbours (2014)

Was anybody really expecting anything great from Bad Neighbours? Its trailer limped into cinemas, packing what you’d suspect are its funniest gags (an air cushion lurking dangerously in an office chair) and not a lot of laughs. And yet, this lowbrow comedy with a bit of a heart won plenty of plaudits in America – perhaps because of how it was, surprisingly, quite funny after all. That much is true: the film will make you laugh quite a bit, frequently with the sheer audacity of its raunchy humour. But it’s still too scattershot an effort to really succeed as a coherent film.

Great comedy is built on friction, tension and fundamental differences. What could be more different than Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne), a young couple with a newborn baby, and the raucous frat boys who move into the house next door? A lot, the film seems to suggest: Mac and Kelly have grown-up responsibilities that college boy Teddy (Zac Efron) and his best buddies don’t. And so, when Mac and Kelly call the cops on a party getting out of control, a war of increasingly outlandish (and downright dangerous) pranks breaks out between the two sides.

There is, actually, quite a lot that does work pretty well in Bad Neighbours. Mac and Kelly are given an unexpected amount of depth, both as individuals torn between their youth and their new child, and as a couple. Teddy, too, comes across as a bit of a lost boy: a Peter Pan who can’t see beyond the lazy hazy days of college, even as his best friend and love-rival Pete (Dave Franco) starts exploring the world beyond. Spice it all up with a clutch of really funny gags, and much of the film goes down surprisingly easily.

But the film also meanders in search of its comedic soul, often feeling like a series of hopefully funny set-pieces strung together with little care for depth and nuance. You’ll be bombarded with humour so bawdy it’s downright offensive – and not necessarily in a good way – like Kelly’s painful brush with alcohol-laced breast milk. It often feels as if the film is operating without a script, the actors improvising their way through a bunch of scenes while director Nicholas Stoller leaves his camera rolling. The battle between young couple and frat boys also becomes ridiculously protracted and quite unbelievable by the end.

At least Stoller’s cast is immensely fun to watch. Rogen plays his standard everyday-schlub role very well, and Efron continues to prove that there’s hope for him yet beyond High School Musical. But the real breakout star here is Byrne: more the straight (wo)man in Bridesmaids, she lets loose here and proves herself to be a wonderfully adept and very brave comedienne. She soldiers through scenes that can’t have been easy to shoot, and does so with such grace and charm that you can practically see where they’d have gone (further) wrong without her.

If you’re looking for a lowbrow comedy with a reasonably good hit rate where gags are concerned, Bad Neighbours might hit the spot – it’s even got a set of characters who are pretty fun to be around, though the outrageous situations in which they keep getting themselves might turn you off. But just because this amiable, dumb and admittedly fun film turned out better than you might expect doesn’t mean it’s actually good.

Basically: Much funnier than you’d expect, with a standout turn from Byrne. But great it ain’t.

Superbad (2007)

High school movies of the grossout variety are pretty much a dime a dozen these days, following the success of American Pie and its numerous sequels. There’s clearly a huge market out there for feel-good fare that allows you to think back fondly (or not) on the politics of pain and humiliation that encapsulated everyone’s high school experience. More recent attempts at bringing this exquisite blend of fart jokes and heartfelt humour to the silver screen have, however, more readily emphasised the bawdy comedy rather than the rite-of-passage aspect of American Pie that lent the film more pathos and durability than you’d expect from cinematic fluff of this sort.

Well, Superbad, which draws out in excruciatingly funny detail the attempts by best buddies Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) to get laid at the last high-school party before they go their separate ways for college, harks back to that winning formula in creating a film that’s at once hilarious and moving. The story really is simple: Seth wants to get with Jules (Emma Stone), a gorgeous girl who apparently hasn’t yet realised what a loser he is and still talks to him; Evan is halfway into some kind of mutual crush with Becca (Martha MacIsaac). To up their cool quotient, both boys go on an epic quest to procure alcohol for Jules’ party, roping in their loser-dork friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and his newly acquired fake ID – except, of course, everything goes wrong. As the boys go on the run from the boozy, slacker arm of the law – featuring Seth Rogen and Bill Hader as a couple of humourously laidback, totally crazy-assed cops – we’re treated to a surprisingly intelligent exploration of the trials and tribulations of growing up, as both boys come somewhat to terms with separation anxiety and figuring out how to get with girls in a way that doesn’t involve just pure sex.

Sounds a bit preachy? Trust me, it’s anything but. Written by Rogen and his childhood buddy Evan Goldberg (yes, they very imaginatively named the lead characters after themselves!), the movie’s humour is skewed and incredibly fast-paced. At every moment, there’s another quip or random incident that is likely to have you scooping your jaw off the floor – which is pretty tough to do when you’re laughing at the same time! Whether it’s the acid-laden quips tossed out by Seth as he mocks the hapless Fogell (also known as the legal boozer 25-year-old ‘McLovin’), or the booze-and-bullets-fuelled educational tour of the city Fogell enjoys courtesy of the most insanely depraved cops in the history of crime, Superbad never lets up. The script adeptly mixes smart quips (rare in a movie fuelled by hormones, beer and getting laid) and ace physical comedy (Seth’s frequent, literal run-ins with cars, Fogell’s accidental capture of a drunk bent on creating some kind of social disturbance, and all the painfully charming attempts by each boy to get it on with the opposite sex). Not to mention visual aids like the dozens and dozens of penis drawings scattered throughout the film and its credits, courtesy of Seth’s apparent… well, fixation with drawing the male anatomy in every shape, form and costume.

Fortunately, the relatively young cast is also up for the challenge: Hill manages to keep his rather underwritten character sympathetic rather than repulsive, which is quite a feat because it never really becomes clear why either Evan or Jules have stuck with Seth the way they have. There’s something distinctly Everyman-ish about the way Hill plays his role that allows him to paper over the parts of the movie that see him fretting childishly that Evan got into a better college than him, or the bits that have him verbally roughing up the dorky Fogell in an almost cruel way. Cera, meanwhile, continues to prove that no one plays awkward or loveable loser quite as well as he does: harking back to his excellent performance in the tragically cancelled Arrested Development, Cera shines whether he’s singing on demand (forced to by a batch of drug-addled people who have confused him for someone else) or fending off the advances of a completely smashed Becca. Rogen and Hader (the latter being an almost disconcertingly handsome doppelganger of The Office‘s Rainn Wilson) are also clearly having the time of their lives as the freakishly irresponsible cops out to prove to Fogell that the fun doesn’t stop when you become a grown-up: it just becomes wackier, more outlandish, and potentially fatal!

The real standout here though, as is almost universally acknowledged, is Mintz-Plasse – with his slightly squeaky, just-out-of-puberty voice and hangdog, geeky demeanour, he breathes surprisingly charming life into the character of Fogell. It’s quite a refreshing change from the traditional sidekick role, typically established to serve as little more than the brunt of cruel jokes – here, Fogell is almost as essential to the main plot as either Seth or Evan; his is also a journey in growing up and figuring out what being a grown-up is about… even if that involves shooting flaming cars up to bury evidence!

If there’s anything that rankles about Superbad, it’s the way the film ends in an almost idyllic fashion – oh, it works, of course, when Seth and Evan meet Jules and Becca in the aftermath of the humilation that all of them suffered (so uniquely high-school!) at the party the night before. But it’s sweet rather than bittersweet, which almost counters the relentlessly irreverent tone adopted for much of the rest of the movie. As already mentioned, it would also be more difficult to warm to the main character of Seth if Hill hadn’t managed to somehow round off the brittle edges of Seth’s jerkishness with a performance that just wasn’t there on the written page.

These are, however, but minor criticisms of what is otherwise a glorious entry in the canon of high school movies of the grossout variety. The humiliation and horror of that period in everyone’s lives is wonderfully captured – Evan’s clueless conversations with Becca in which she’s flirting her little ass off and he just doesn’t know, even as he tries to impress her – and remarkably true to life, for all the madcap hilarity that’s swirling around the proceedings. (Seth’s encounter with a randy, drunken lass at a party he crashes with Evan? Now that’s grossout humour at its most outrageous and unmitigated!) At its best, Superbad is fun, smart and touching; a feat for a movie first written by Rogen and Goldberg at the age of 13 (!) that might too easily have just been another run-of-the-mill teen comedy.

Knocked Up (2007)

I was hoping for great things from Knocked Up, though I suppose I should have learnt by now to keep my expectations low – that always leaves me pleasantly surprised in the movie theatre. But reviews of the latest lowbrow comedy for adults from writer-director Judd Apatow, following his 2005 smash hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, were almost unanimous in declaring it an utter triumph. Smart, mature and funny, apparently, with great, intelligent turns from the two leads Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl. Well, I’m afraid I’ll have to beg to disagree here.

When the movie begins, it’s a great time to be Alison Scott (Heigl) – she’s gorgeous, blonde and has just landed herself a dream gig as an on-air interviewer for an entertainment channel news show. The fateful night she chooses to paint the town red with her bitterly married sister Debbie (Leslie Mann), she meets gainfully unemployed schlub Ben (Rogen) and has an alcohol-fuelled, unfortunately condomless one-night stand with him. When she gets eponymously knocked up, she has to figure out a life for herself, her baby and for the dorky, under-achieving guy she’d never have called back under any other circumstance. So we watch Alison and Ben fall in love after making a baby together – or, at least, they try to do so, even as Debbie’s marriage to her curiously distant husband Pete (Paul Rudd) falls apart.

After sitting through the movie’s 129-minute running time, I have concluded that KU is, by and large, a decidely mediocre film. Not that it isn’t passably entertaining – there are moments, usually involving Ben’s slacker buddies and all the pointless nonsense they get up to as they try to launch a porn website that’s already a few years obsolete, that are quite funny. And some of the movie’s emotional, dramatic moments are quite effective; for example, when Ben hazards a clumsy proposal of marriage to Alison, when he has nothing to offer her but an empty ring box and a promise of a future he didn’t really have until he got her pregnant.

However, a word of warning is in order. What you get out of watching KU probably has a lot to do with what you expected going in. The movie poster would have you believe that you’re seeing a totally fun, silly romantic comedy that’s gossamer-light and over in a tidy 80 minutes; reviews suggest you’re getting an intelligent rom-com laced with gross-out humour but which never panders completely to the lowest common denominator. Certainly, Apatow has quite daringly made his movie a dramedy: the belly laughs are few and far between, and there are some small chuckles to be had along the way, but he chooses to focus also quite a lot on the pure drama angle of Alison and Ben’s situation. Now, this sounds promising, doesn’t it? There are so many ways this could have been played, to produce a movie that’s as funny, sweet, quirky and offbeat as you’d like, while never dumbing itself down. Or so one would think. Unfortunately, KU isn’t half as original as you’d hoped it would be. Aside from an underlying wit that’s a tad more sardonic than one usually gets from straightforward rom-coms, KU devolves into something resembling a dodgy Hallmark movie-of-the-week in pretty short order, as real life and responsibilities predictably force Ben to shake himself out of his childish rut and grow up (all together now: groan!). I’ve seen the same story told a thousand times, and if it’s not matched by characters that are believable and real, it’s difficult to buy into the movie as a whole.

If it isn’t clear by now, Apatow’s attempts at character development are patchy at best. He tries mightily to focus on the myriad emotions his characters struggle with as they experience something neither of them expected – for example, in scenes featuring Alison trying to get sexual satisfaction from an edgy Ben who doesn’t want to accidentally blind his kid, or as Alison realises that Ben hasn’t read any of the pregnancy books he bought in the first flush of enthusiasm for the baby. But when the characters involved aren’t realistic, the audience can’t really be expected to care. Ben is the typical anti-hero, charming in a dorky kind of way, and his emotional journey is probably best charted throughout the film. It’s Alison I have a problem with, and re-reading my Virgin review, I realise that this might be Apatow’s fatal flaw: his inability to write convincing female characters with depth. Like empty cypher Trish (wasting the brilliant Catherine Keener’s screentime, might I add), Alison makes no impact as a lead character. There is nothing in the film – nothing – that explains her desire to keep the child, despite advice from her own flighty mother to abort, and all the other practical reasons she should consider. Such as the fact that this was an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy that could screw up her career. I’m not advocating abortion here, I’m just saying that there should have been a scene, a line, anything, that explained Alison’s desire to keep the baby, other than that there wouldn’t be a movie if she didn’t.

Usually, a rom-com with a lacklustre leading couple makes up for it with the invariably endlessly entertaining second-string best-friend roles. They always perk up the movie, and Debbie and Pete do, for a while. Their marriage is also an interesting study, as she grows to suspect that he’s having an affair, when all Pete wants is alone time from a family he’s not sure he deserves. Weighty ideas there, and occasionally well-examined: when Debbie follows Pete into an empty house, she only finds him coming up with his own fantasy baseball league. But here, Apatow messes up somewhat by turning Debbie into a shrill, controlling shrew. How am I supposed to sympathise with her when I rather understand why Pete doesn’t want to be around her all the time?

KU isn’t, by a long shot, the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It is truly quite watchable, with smatterings of great dialogue (like whenever Ben chats about his life and options with his laidback dad, played by Harold Ramis) and the cast is almost too good for their roles, with Rogen radiating an easy stoner charm that should net him a lot of roles in the kind of pure gross-out movie Apatow is trying to transform. Rudd is reliably good, as always, and Mann and Heigl are fine (though Heigl lacks the spark that would mark her out as a big-screen presence to watch). However, when I’ve been led to believe that what I’ll be seeing is akin to a revolution of the gross-out rom-com, I’d have to say I found KU distinctly disappointing given its groaning predictability and weak characters, not to mention the fact that it’s simply far too long (judicious editing would have done it no end of good). As a summer comedy, KU is, unfortunately, more of a fizzle than a spark.